Diary. August 2

I'm sitting in my Khrushchyovka on Vasilievsky Island, at an old table. Grandma is wailing: "Dmitry, how thin you've become, skin and bones, what did they do to you in that America?" And I'm sitting there, drinking tea from her favorite mug with chamomile and writing these lines. I'm thinking about sending this diary to Mark in his faraway New York. He's probably there, drinking his cardboard coffee and carrying magazines, and I'm here, in my own room, where the wallpaper is peeling off and the Rubin TV flickers like in the nineties. But in my head there's not St. Petersburg, but Brooklyn, the institute, Earl Knight's files and that idea that was born then, in a motel, under the howl of sirens and the smell of mold. I figured out how to set a trap for that reptile - the D.E.L.I.A. project - and, damn it, I almost did it.

It all started the day after I sat on the bench with a bottle of Budweiser and told Mark that money wasn't everything. On July 7th, I showed up at the institute feeling like a soldier about to go to battle. My coat was on my shoulders like armor, although Mark was smirking again as he looked at it. I headed straight to Tony's office, where he was already sitting, chewing gum, with his long hair and an MIT T-shirt. On the desk was the same folder, tattered and stained with coffee, as if it had been dragged all over Brooklyn. Tony looked at me like I was crazy when I said, "Go ahead, open it up so we can finish reading this graveyard of papers." He just nodded, spat his gum into the trash, and reached for the folder. We sat down like two miners digging in a mine shaft where the coal is other people's lives.

We flipped through the reports, each one a punch to the gut. I already knew about Isaac Brown in Miami and Laura Smith in Houston, their deaths, their caregivers crushed by cars, like a bad dream. There were others, too, Eliza Johnson, Alexander Martin, names that sounded like tombstones. But then came Delia York. Hers was the oldest story in the file, and, boy, was it the straw that broke the camel's back. Delia, born May 20, 1981, in the Bronx, New York, to a family that was doomed from the start. Her father, Gene York, 35, a pharmacist, smuggled expired pills into his home, and her mother, Karen, 32, unemployed, sought "spiritual cleansing" in cheap sanitariums. Delia grew up in a cramped, damp-smelling apartment, drawing flowers and dogs in her notebooks, dreaming of running away to California with her neighbor's dog, Ryder. Her life fell apart in 1989, when her friend Josephine Thueson was accused of "corruption" because of Delia's early menstruation - an absurdity for which Josephine got 18 years. In 1991, Delia's father lost his leg in a car accident, her mother shot herself in front of her, and Delia herself died in March of that year from "atypical uterine sarcoma" after surgery at Bellevue Hospital. Her story, like the stories of Eliza, Alexander, Laura, Isaac, was steeped in pain and the absurd deaths all around - trucks, cranes, suicides, snakes. Earl Knight, the cop who dug into her case, wrote about her as if she were his daughter. He made the acronym D.E.L.I.A. out of their names, but the "D" still rankled in his mind - Delia? The Devil? A Dummy?

I put the folder down, feeling my insides boil. Tony looked at me, his gum frozen in his mouth.

"Dmitry, what's wrong? It's like you saw a ghost on your face," he said, stumbling in his Russian.

"It's not a ghost, Tony," I said, gritting my teeth. "It's a grave. And we're burrowing in it like worms."

He frowned but said nothing. I stood up, straightened my coat and said:

"Enough. Time to set a trap for this bastard. Call everyone into the room, Tony. Elizabeth, Linda, Richard, Caroline - everyone. I want to talk."

Tony blinked as if I had asked him to launch a rocket to Mars.

"Dmitry, that's not how it's done. You need to officially submit a request, Elizabeth will issue a summons. This is America, everything is on paper here."

I almost screamed. Papers? When children die and we mix their cages with rats'? But I held back and just nodded.

"Okay, fill out your paperwork. I'll be waiting."

I sat back down, feeling the blood pounding in my temples. A plan was already spinning in my head. My idea about low-frequency electromagnetic fields was ready, like a bullet in a clip. I knew it was a dead end - at LETI, Zaitsev and I tested EMFs until we were blue in the face, and found nothing but burnt-out coils. But the Americans don't know that. In the eighties, their magazines wrote about microwaves and "Russian scientists" as if they were shamans, but serious research never reached them. I'll serve them this hypothesis like candy: "Atypical tumors, paralysis, all this - from old transformers, radars, power lines." Elizabeth, with her hawk eyes, might snort, but Mark will swallow it - he loves "breakthroughs." Linda will run to her spectrophotometers, Richard will call me a charlatan, and Caroline will recalculate the budget. They will rush to check, spend months, and in the end - emptiness. And maybe then they will close this damned D.E.L.I.A. project, because digging in graves for grants is not science, but desecration.

I sat in Tony's office, staring out the window. Brooklyn was humming outside-cars, sirens, someone cursing in Spanish. My blood pounded like a metronome in my temples, and my mind was spinning a plan: slip them an EMF, lead them into a dead end, buy time. I waited to be called into the room like a soldier about to attack, when the door creaked and a graduate student, Linda, walked in, her hair always wild, her laptop tucked under her arm. She looked at me like I was an exhibit in a museum and said,

"Mr. Sukhov, the call has been issued, but the room is occupied. Elizabeth said that the discussion will be tomorrow, at ten in the morning."

"Tomorrow?!" I almost started screaming. "Linda, are you serious? We're digging in graves here, and you're telling me "tomorrow"?"